Books for Breakfast (Ireland)

Send us Fan Mail This year marks the 45th anniversary of Salmon Poetry now based in The Salmon Bookshop and Literary Centre, in Ennistymon, County Clare. We invited poet and critic Ciarán O’Rourke , whose own new collection, Prophetstown , is published by Irish Pages in August, to review four new poetry books from Salmon Poetry . And we talk to US poet Tess Barry, a  native of Western Pennsylvania...

Send us Fan Mail Epistolary novels used to be all the rage Think Clarissa , think Dracula , think the more recent We need to talk about Kevin . Last year saw another smash hit epistolary novel, The Correspondent by Virginia Evans , published to wide acclaim and stellar sales, and shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s Fiction prize . Three times a week, 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp sits down at her des...

Send us Fan Mail On today's show we travel down the road to Carlow University Pittsburgh's MFA in Creative Writing Program during its annual June residency at Trinity College, Dublin where we have been invited to interview novelist Caitriona Lally about her latest book, the memoir Home Economics. So grab that flat white, latte, tea and rasher sandwich and have a listen to Caitriona'...

Send us Fan Mail On today's episode we visit 11 Parnell Square in Dublin for the launch of Poetry Ireland/Éigse Éireann's restored headquarters. We hear about the new performance spaces, education resources and Seamus Heaney Library and talk to director Claire Power about her vision for the building and the organisation. We also talk to Poet in Residence Sean Borodale about his poetry an...

Send us Fan Mail On today’s show we talk to Joseph Woods , director of the Strokestown Poetry Festival about what this year's programme will offer poetry lovers this May Bank Holiday weekend in Strokestown House. Ands we welcome back to the breakfast table poet and Irish Times reviewer Adam Wyeth to talk with us about recent poetry publications that have grabbed his attention. Adam is himself...

Send us Fan Mail This morning we talk to Mary Costello about her new novel A Beautiful Loan .  My name is Anna, and for some time now, I have been trying to account for certain events in my life – my adult life, that is – which, from this vantage point of forty-five years, I often find baffling … In 1985 Dublin, nineteen-year-old Anna Hughes is in thrall to Peter Gallagher, an older, worldly man....

Send us Fan Mail In this episode we go to one of our favourite places in Dublin, Hodges Figgis bookshop in Dawson Street, to interview Cathy Galvin on the occasion of the launch of her collection of poems from Bloodaxe, Ethnology, A Love Song for Connemara . We also meet and hear poet John F. Deane , who spoke about Cathy’s book and read some of his own recently published Carcanet collection, Jona...

Send us Fan Mail We’re back for the first episode of 2026. This week we’re back in Books Upstairs in Dublin to interview Hugo Hamilton about his latest novel, Conversation with the Sea. Fleeing his failed marriage in Berlin, Lukas Dorn revisits the West of Ireland, the place of his honeymoon two decades earlier. While his former wife is being cancelled at work and his daughter is arrested at a str...

Send us Fan Mail Mince pie and Christmas cracker laden, today’s breakfast table is very festive indeed as we celebrate the best of books and cultural events in 2025. To help us celebrate we’ve gathered at our table four writers who have each been asked to choose just one book, either fiction or non fiction that they’ve especially admired this year and one cultural event –  film, exhibition, music...

Send us Fan Mail This morning we welcome poet and critic Ciarán O’Rourke to our breakfast table here in Dublin 8. Ciarán has published two collections of poems with Irish Pages Press, The Buried Breath in 2018  and Phantom Gang   in 2022, and he also runs the poetry website ragpickerpoetry.net . Ciarán talk about five recent books of poetry: Eiléan Ní Cuilleanáin , New   Selected Poems ; Catherine...

Send us Fan Mail On today’s episode we travel to IMMA and the Dublin Book Festival to meet and talk with İlhan Sami Çomak , a Kurdish Turkish poet who has spent almost  thirty years imprisoned in Turkey. He was arrested in 1994 and charged with membership of the banned Kurdistan Workers' Part. In jail, Çomak released eight books of poetry and became one of Turkey's longest serving politi...

Send us Fan Mail On this morning's episode we talk to Ger Reidy about his latest poetry collection, Clay ;  Liam Carson tells us about the latest edition of IMRAM , the Irish language festival and the increasing visibility of Irish, and I chat to Enda Wyley about her book, Sudden Light and about winning the Lawrence O' Shaughnessy Award for poetry. This episode is supported by a Project...

Send us Fan Mail On today’s episode poet and critic Adam Wyeth reviews nine new poetry collections. Under the microscope are Infinity Pool by V ona Groarke ; Belfast Twilight by Liam Carson ; Harbour Doubts by Bebe Ahley ; Over Here by Alan Gillis ; Chic to be Sad by Molly Twomey ; New Arcana by Jesica Traynor ; The Convent of Mercy by Tom French ; À la Belle Étoile: The odyssey of Jeanne by Afric...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode we invite Colm Tóibín to the breakfast table to discuss his new book A Ship in Full Sail: The Laureate Lectures and Other Writings . The book collects the blogs he wrote during his term as Laureate for Irish Fiction,  one written each month on topics as diverse as  Artificial Intelligence, reading Ulysses, the discomfort of Salman Rushdie in the wilds of County Dub...

Send us Fan Mail On this morning's show novelist Henrietta McKervey talks to us about four recent novels: Fair Play by Louise Hegarty, Air by John Boyne, Murder takes a Vacation by Laura Lippman and Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner.  And she also does a surprising Toaster Challenge . Listen to see what she chooses ... Henrietta McKervey is the author of the acclaimed novels Wha...

Send us Fan Mail This episode sees us visiting Dublin's historic United Arts Club where Enda interviews Mary O'Donnell about her latest collection of short stories, Walking Ghosts.  Praise for Walking Ghosts 'Each story shines in its own distinctive light.' — Neil Hegarty 'O'Donnell is unflinching in her ability to display humanity in all its flaws and vulnerabilities...

Send us Fan Mail On this episode we drop in to the Carlow University Pittsburgh MFA summer programme in Trinity College, Dublin to interview Sarah Moss about her latest novel, Ripeness .  'Tender and rueful . . . Sarah Moss is a marvel of insight and eloquence' - Emma Donoghue 'One of our greatest living writers' - Katherine May, author of Wintering More Praise for Sarah Moss:...

Send us Fan Mail On this episode we talk about this year's International Literature Festival Dublin which runs from 16-25 May, and where Enda will be interviewing novelists Gethan Dick  and Patrick Holloway . We also talk to Karin-Lin Greenberg about Your Are Here , her novel set in a dying mall in upstate New York. "Lin-Greenberg’s web of characters illustrate the complex lives of ordin...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, on Poetry Day, we cross the Atlantic and. breakfast in Miami, where we talk to Cuban American poet Richard Blanco about his Homeland of my Body: New and Selected Poems , a rich, accomplished, intensely intimate collection with two full sections of new poems bookending Blanco’s selections from his five previous volumes. We also feature this year’s Strokestown Inter...

Send us Fan Mail On this episode we talk to poet novelist and critic Mary O’Donnell about Mary O’Malley’s The Shark Nursery , Patrick Holloway’s The Language of Remembering ,  ! All’ ARME /?   by Eilish Martin and Beginnings Over and Over: Four New Poets from Ireland , edited by Leeanne Quinn . We also give a shout out to a special anthology for One Dublin One Book, Dublin, Written in our Hearts ,...

Send us Fan Mail Finding inspiration in the local and near at had, attentive to climate concern and global unrest, to home and homeless, belonging and welcome, concern and global and welcome – on today’s episode we talk to poet and publisher Pat Boran about his eight collection Hedge School .  'A writer of great tenderness and lyricism' – Agenda , UK '... local and international, fu...

Send us Fan Mail ‘A beautiful tapestry of late middle age reckoning’ – today we interview the writer Mary Morrissy about her new collection of short stories, Twenty-Twenty Vision , published by Lilliput Press. For her Toaster Challenge , Mary chooses The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazard . Get the coffee on! This episode is supported by a Project Award from the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon....

Send us Fan Mail Was 1950s Dublin really a place of murder and intrigue? On today’s show we travel to the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation   in Dublin’s Fenian Street to talk to novelist John Banville about his latest novel, The Drowned , the fourth in a series featuring Detective Inspector St John Strafford and the pathologist Quirke familiar to many from the Benjamin Black no...

Send us Fan Mail How much do we need to know about a writer's life? How does the life impinge on the work? What is the human price of art? In this episode we talk to biographer Adrian Frazier about John Montague: A Poet's Life . ‘The best Irish poet of his generation’ – Derek Mahon Already a highly lauded biographer, Adrian Frazier was a close acquaintance of Montague for more than forty...

Send us Fan Mail In the darkness of an old asylum, a young man unscrews the lid from a bottle of sleeping pills. In the nearby village, two couples begin their day. Local doctor, Eric Parry, mulling secrets, sets out on his rounds, while his pregnant wife sleeps on in the warmth of their cottage.  Across the field, in a farmhouse impossible to heat, funny, troubled Rita Simmons is also asleep, her...